PHOENIX — Jesus Himself was a refugee, Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted told a news conference here as some Arizona religious officials continued to push for quick congressional approval of “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Olmsted linked this push with Christian duties of basic charity in the Bible, according to an article posted November 26 at the Phoenix diocesan web site, “Arizona bishops lend voices to call for immigration reform.”
Phoenix’s auxiliary bishop, Eduardo Nevares, was quoted in support of the “reform,” which includes a “path to citizenship”: “We have to keep fanning the flame to keep the interest alive.”
With Christmas around the corner, a person might recall the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt to escape persecution.
However, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph never received Egyptian citizenship. Indeed, to have insisted on remaining in that foreign land would have defeated His mission. They returned to their homeland when Herod’s threat had passed.
Once again U.S. religious officials are confusing the undoubted biblical duties of mercy and compassion with their badly flawed political program of “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Even Arizona’s famously open-borders senator, Republican John McCain, showed more concern over the importance of border security than these religious figures did in November.
Although McCain promotes “immigration reform” whenever possible, the heat from his constituents apparently was becoming too much to bear once more.
The Washington Examiner posted on November 29 that McCain complained because he couldn’t get important information for his southern Arizona constituents who have drug traffickers crossing through their property at night.
This drug invasion is nothing new and is only one aspect of the lawlessness and chaos that Arizonans are expected to tolerate.
McCain complained that Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security, was being just as evasive as Napolitano had been about providing key border-security information.
The Examiner quoted McCain: “How could I go back home and tell the people of southern Arizona, ‘Oh, by the way, [Johnson] wouldn’t tell me what it takes to secure your lives,’ because right now at night they have people going across their property who are trafficking drugs.”
Politico.com posted on November 20 that McCain wrote Johnson to say he “was ‘frustrated’ by Napolitano’s ‘obdurate refusal to provide important, relevant information’.”
McCain’s own web site showed his correspondence telling Johnson that “one of the most difficult challenges confronting the Department of Homeland Security…is securing our borders and preventing illegal entry.”
The powder-keg potential of the U.S.-Mexican border was emphasized again on November 24, when a crowd of perhaps 150 Latinos tried to march from Mexico into San Diego in broad daylight, throwing rocks and bottles at U.S. Border Patrol agents.
However, they were turned back into Mexico when more U.S. agents congregated to assist the first officer whom the Latinos attacked.
The Latinos cried out “Viva Villa,” honoring Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit of a century ago who killed Americans and violated the U.S. border.
On November 25, San Diego’s main daily news platform, U-T San Diego, quoted a foe of illegal immigration, Jeff Schwilk, of the San Diegans for Secure Borders Coalition:
“Obviously, these attempted mass crossings and attacks on our border agents show that our border is not secure. All the talk in Washington this year of another amnesty for 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants is just encouraging more desperate foreigners to enter our country illegally.”
A follow-up U-T San Diego story posted November 26 said: “A copy of a leaflet calling for the march said it was organized ‘with the intention of crossing to the United States, to reunite with our children, families.’ The Spanish-language text spoke of problems in Mexico, ‘and for that reason, we must unite and go to the United States.’ It concluded by calling for discretion.”
U-T San Diego said a Border Patrol spokeswoman said that “[a]s the crowd kept advancing and throwing rocks and bottles . . . more agents came to the scene and used . . . ‘intermediate use-of-force devices’ to push back the group.”
San Diego’s NBC television affiliate, Channel 7, interviewed a union spokesman for the U.S. border agents, Gabriel Pacheco, who said the border violators “had their phones out, so this group was out to spark an incident. That’s what they wanted to do.”
If the U.S. elite and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops would stop insisting that only “comprehensive immigration reform” is acceptable, they and other Americans could turn their attention to more modest measures of compassion instead of trying to legitimize a mass invasion.
In a December 1 interview, Rey Torres, the president of the conservative Arizona Latino Republican Association (ALRA), told The Wanderer that “this battle cry” of “Viva Villa” used by the protesters trying to enter San Diego “doesn’t warm our hearts.”
Torres said his own family members in Mexico had suffered at the hands of Villa’s forces a century ago, including his paternal great-uncle being killed.
“My entire paternal side left Mexico” because of Villa, Torres said. “By 1919, everybody had already left the country.”
Asked if his family entered the U.S. legally, he replied, “Of course they did. . . . They did everything correctly” when coming here. “There was no border-jumping as far as our family was concerned.”
Referring to the potentially deadly objects that the protesters hurled at the Border Patrol on November 24, Torres said that “what’s gonna be worse” is when they start using bottle rockets and Molotov cocktails against the agents, such as he saw anarchists using in Mexico City in September when he was on a trade visit there with Arizona legislators and businessmen.
The anarchists used these weapons against fellow Mexicans, Mexico City police, and Federales, Torres said.
Asked by The Wanderer about Catholic bishops promoting illegal immigration, including the December 2011 letter specifically issued by U.S. Latino bishops to illegal immigrants, Torres said, “The language that comes from these bishops . . . is going to do nothing but fan those flames.”
In the Phoenix Diocese, Torres asserted, Auxiliary Bishop Nevares acts as if his role is to minister to the illegal immigrant population, although he should focus on integrating Latinos into the wider community.
“I’ve seen it happen” that “two distinct communities” in Phoenix-area parishes are “pitted against each other,” creating an atmosphere “of animosity, not of unity,” Torres said.
He said the result is “subversive of what makes this country desirous for so many people to come to.”
The Wanderer asked a spokesman for the Phoenix Diocese to comment about any possible concerns that bishops’ open-borders statements contribute to events like the recent attempted San Diego invasion, as well as Torres’ remarks about Nevares. The diocese didn’t respond.
Although most Americans oppose “comprehensive immigration reform,” U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, has been under tremendous pressure from the arrogant national elite, including many big-business Republicans, to shove amnesty through his chamber anyway.
Boehner, however, has said House Republicans will take a piecemeal approach rather than capitulate to the huge, dangerous amnesty bill passed last June by the Democrat-controlled Senate.
But Americans may have had fresh reason to worry when Boehner announced on December 3 that he has hired a longtime activist for open borders as his immigration adviser. The Washington Times reported that the woman, Rebecca Tallent, previously worked on immigration issues for both John McCain and former Arizona Cong. Jim Kolbe — an open-borders liberal Republican beloved of the state’s corrupt political establishment.
The Times quoted Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, as saying, “Tallent’s hiring suggests [Boehner] really does still want to push an amnesty through the House, which to me suggests that the immigration hawks still have their work cut out for them.”
It goes without saying that if Republicans help deliver the massive amnesty that lawbreaking Democrat Barack Obama has been pleading for, the GOP will have seriously fractured its ability to attract voters in 2014. Voters are fed up with both major parties conspiring to grind the public under their heels.
Not long before Tallent’s hiring was revealed, a southern Arizona resident told The Wanderer that longtime failure to secure the border as the first priority has led to continuing serious problems.
Wisconsin native Gary Meinert, who retired to southern Arizona planning to play golf, became an activist against illegal immigration when he learned of the pressing problems in his new state.
The problems occur on a number of fronts, from vicious, roaming gun-toting drug smugglers endangering Arizona residents to the innocuous-seeming efforts of people who leave jugs of water in the desert so illegal aliens don’t die of dehydration as they sneak into the U.S.
Aside from the health threat to a severely overheated alien gulping down a jug of water, and the perilous bacteria that can breed overnight in the jugs left in the blistering desert, Meinert said there’s another factor.
In an e-mail, Meinert told The Wanderer about one college student who left water jugs for aliens: “I asked her, if she came upon an illegal alien, whether she contacted the Border Patrol to report him (or them). She responded that she did not. I then asked her if she knew if the individual was a child molester or murderer. Her response was a simple, ‘We don’t judge them’.”
Meinert continued: “I responded, ‘Oh yes, you do! You judge them fit and safe to enter our towns and cities.’ Then I told her about a close friend whose granddaughter was raped and murdered by an illegal alien in northern Wisconsin. He was captured the next day and told the officials he had come through the desert south of Tucson and was picked up and aided by ‘nice people’.”

St. Joseph The Worker

Modern nations traditionally use their immigration policies to approve newcomers they judge would be an asset to their lands. Many Latinos obviously would qualify as upstanding individuals. However, there’s a brutality among lawbreakers that some people may have problems comprehending.
On November 26, the Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff’s Office said that an illegal alien in custody had killed another inmate as a way to avoid being deported back to Mexico. Pinal County is southeast of Phoenix’s Maricopa County.
In a statement, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said: “As an illegal, Roberto Fernandez originally committed a sex crime in the U.S. and was sent to prison. Now, as he is approaching his release from prison and would be deported back to Mexico, he brutally murdered a U.S. citizen to ensure that he’s not deported. This is a sick and heinous crime amid countless other crimes committed by criminal illegals.
“When does it become enough,” Babeu continued, “for Congress and President Obama to finally start enforcing our immigration laws and secure the border? When does it become enough for our own elected leaders to put American citizens and our rights and our own safety first, rather than putting all their efforts into pushing for green cards and amnesty for 11 to 20 million illegals?”
When The Wanderer asked prayerful Phoenix Catholic teacher Remi Ruiz about illegal immigration, he suggested putting the problem into the hands of St. Joseph the Worker for a just solution, based on being truthful and hard-working.
“There are some people who are lazy and don’t put their effort into working and spend much time becoming hot air,” Ruiz said. “And there are others who do work hard and apply themselves. They don’t wear a ‘V’ over their forehead for ‘Victim,’ but they will do what they can.
“There are those who steal other people’s jobs and don’t pay taxes according to what is right and just, to render to Caesar what belongs to him, and that creates great problems with health care and all sorts of other things,” Ruiz continued. “So my take is, go to St. Joseph the Worker, and if more people would imitate him, we would have far fewer problems and we wouldn’t need politicians to help us.”

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Our Catholic Faith (Section B of print edition)

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